Nobody said anything.
Soo-Lee said earlier that she could feel something beginning and this had to be it or, at the very least, the prelude. A picture was coming up on the screen, but it was still rolling and bleached out. It was hard to say at first what they were looking at, but Creep knew it was coming. Those old tubes took time to warm up. The image would never be HD, but it would come. In its own way and time, it would come… and maybe this was what he feared the most.
He waited there with the others, wringing his sweaty palms.
The image stabilized. It was still grainy and not exactly sharp, but it was certainly clearer and they could see exactly what was going on. It showed a family sitting around a dinner table. A 1950s family by the looks of it. A mother and father and two boys having an animated conversation. There was no sound, but a canned laugh track was almost a given. As the peas and chicken were passed, the boys got very excited. They apparently were launching some sort of scheme that made the mother look comically overwhelmed and the father exasperated with a clear oh-boy-here-we-go-again kind of look.
“It looks familiar somehow,” Soo-Lee said.
Lex swallowed. “Yes… I think it’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. We had to watch it once in Mass Media in high school.”
“When is it from?” Soo-Lee asked. “The fifties? The sixties?”
“It ran a long time, as I recall, from the fifties into the sixties. But their sons are small here and judging from the furnishings, I’m going to say this episode is from sometime before 1960.”
“And why does that matter?” Creep asked.
“Because, again, our theoretical other is creating a physical image of the good old days before the social upheaval of the 1960s. This whole nightmare we’re trapped in has something to do with that, with some incident that happened back then.” He shrugged. “Maybe our other is trying to recreate a world before something happened.”
“What?” Soo-Lee said.
“A tragedy? Something that happened to the town or them personally. I don’t know.”
“You’re guessing,” Creep said.
“Of course I am,” Lex admitted.
The sitcom played on and Creep sat there, tensely, the images filling the room with flickering light. Soo-Lee’s and Lex’s faces were painted with a dull blue glow. What was the point of this? Was it somebody’s favorite show back in the good old days or was it kind of like Lex intimated, a frame of reference for a simpler time before some horrendous tragedy? Creep didn’t really care. He just wanted out. It all made him panicky because he knew it was leading up to something bad.
The camera panned away from the joyfully arguing family and focused in on an archway behind them that presumably led into a very standard 1950s living room. They saw a shadowy gray form sitting near the wall. It was ghost-like, out of focus, somehow contorted as if it had been put together wrong. There was a table before it with a body on it. A woman.
Creep was almost certain it was Danielle.
It was too dim and shadowy to be certain, but he had the feeling it was. The certainty was like a blade of ice in his heart. The shadowy figure—it was one of those doll people, he realized—was doing things to the body. It opened the corpse up, pulling things out, plucking off limbs like the wings of flies, carefully replacing everything with items he could not be sure of other than what appeared to be prosthetic arms and legs, a bundle of gears and cogs like the guts of a clock that were stuffed into the body cavity. Then the doll person was doing something to the face, peeling and slicing, then cutting and finally sewing. Stitching up what it had made with black gut that looked like fence wire.
“Shut it off,” Soo-Lee said. “Please shut it off.”
Creep was more than happy to oblige. He tried turning the on/off knob, but it did no good. The TV wasn’t even on and it wasn’t plugged into anything.
“It won’t do any good,” Lex said.
Creep knew it wouldn’t, but he tried anyway. He had the feeling that even if he had a hammer in his hand he could not have broken the bubble screen. It was not part of the plan, part of the game that was being played on them.
Now the Nelsons were gone along with their sons.
The camera had pulled away from the weird anatomical plunderings in the living room and was panning over the dining table, revealing the half-eaten food on the plates, the glasses of milk half-drank, the chicken and vegetables that still steamed on their serving trays. It showed them this, then it showed them the chairs pulled away from the table. One of them was tipped over, as if someone had left in a great hurry.
The camera passed by a single window quickly and light flickered out there beyond the curtains, the jumping light of a bonfire. But the camera didn’t waste too much time with that. It pulled back now and they could see the shadowy doll figure standing in the corner, head hanging to one side as if its neck was broken. It looked like some kind of mannequin leaning there, something incapable of movement.
The body was no longer on the table.
Creep felt an icy/hot fear-sweat run down his face. What had been on the table was shambling in the direction of the camera that seemed to be fixed now as if it was sitting on a tripod. The figure came closer, moving with an uneasy limping, seesawing sort of locomotion. One of its arms swung back and forth with pendulum strokes, a limp and dead thing, the other was missing.
“That’s Danielle,” Soo-Lee said, something breaking in her voice.
The figure got closer. It was still blurry and out of focus, but there was no mistaking that it was Danielle… or that it had been Danielle. Her long blonde hair was pulled over to one side of her head, gathered at one shoulder in snake-like tresses. Her face was pallid, grotesque, made of something that was not skin exactly, one eye a black fissure, the other staring out at them with a cataleptic glaze… but set back as if she was looking through the eyehole of a rubber mask. It rolled in its socket like a marble
She was trying to speak.
The cloth-like material of her face moved like it was alive. Her mouth was horribly lopsided. One side of it opened to speak, but the other side remained fused as if it was sewn shut.
“TURN IT OFF!” Soo-Lee said, sitting up. “TURN THAT FUCKING THING OFF!”
Creep just sat there, unable to move.
Danielle’s single eye had been looking at him, now it was looking right at Soo-Lee and there was no mistaking it despite the fuzzy, wavering image. She continued to speak and Soo-Lee clasped her hands to either side of her head like she was trying to keep it from flying apart. She had taken more than she could stand and she was very close to a breakdown.
Lex jumped up and the Danielle-thing tracked him with her eye.
He ran at the TV and kicked the screen with everything he had.
Creep was sure it would never break because that’s how things worked in places like this that were sculpted from the bits and pieces of nightmare. He was surprised when a crack appeared in the crystal. Danielle was slowly shaking her head from side to side as if she was disappointed. By then, Lex had kicked the TV two more times and just before the screen went black, Creep saw Danielle open her horribly synthetic mouth and scream. Though there was no sound, he could hear it echoing around inside his skull until he thought that he would be the one to have a breakdown.
Then the screen went black.
There was a tiny white dot that gradually faded. But before it did, at the very moment Lex gave it his last and most powerful kick, a sound rushed through the house that seemed to be carried on a moaning wind of burning air: OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. The chilling, sibilant sighing of what seemed to be hundreds of voices that cycled through the rooms and died out below them, somewhere in the vicinity of the cellar.